The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In various integrated circuits large amounts of data are passed among different modules of an integrated circuit device, which in some emerging architectures are distributed among separate but communicatively coupled chips. Data-bit inversion (DBI) is a technique used in data transfer to minimize noise generation and reduce error probability. In an example, a DBI signal is added into a data bus and is transmitted with data bits on the data bus. The DBI signal is used to indicate whether the data bits on the data bus are inverted. In an AC DBI mode, the data bits on the data bus are suitably inverted to reduce the number of bit-transitions between consecutive transmissions on the data bus, and thus reduce noise generation and error probability. Conventionally, an additional dedicated valid signal is provided to facilitate determination of whether signals on the data bus indeed constitute valid data or merely noise.